Jon Rynn's blog

Seymour Melman was one of the most important political economists and peace activists of the 20th century. He would have been 100 years old on December 30, 2017 (he died in 2004), therefore this is a good time to consider his legacy, and more importantly from his point of view, to think about how his writings can help us achieve a more just world.

Progressives are resisting Trump, but we need to come up with a replacement for his noxious agenda if we are to turn back the tide of bigotry and 19th century ideology that he has unleashed. We can resist while at the same time we build a movement to replace Trump’s right-wing nationalism with a bold progressive agenda that concentrates on creating millions of good jobs. Trump has been able to act like the pied piper of the working class by holding out the hope of creating jobs, as have other nationalists like Marine Le Pen, but progressives can put forward a reality-based jobs program.

The following is an essay I wrote for the 2016 essay competition by the Next System Project.

The Turquoise Society: From self-destruction to self-regeneration

It is possible to build a better world. We have the technology, but we are missing the framework of ideas that we need to create global civilization 2.0. This essay will present a political/economic/environmental framework, or paradigm, that I hope will contribute to the project of turning our state of affairs around.

The progressive movement needs a new way to understand both the economy and the state. Mainstream economics, as I will argue, lays at the center of the conservative assault on the state, but mainstream economics also ignores the environment. We need a new economics which is centered around production, not exchange as in mainstream economics. Production means not only the ability to generate goods and services and thereby create the conditions for widespread prosperity, but also the production of life in ecosystems. In other words, production means producing life, both for people and for all other living things on the planet.

I am calling a society that produces prosperity for both humans and all life a ‘turquoise society’ because turquoise is a combination of the green of environmentalism, as well as the blue of the blue-collar worker in manufacturing. I will argue that manufacturing is the central process in a human economy, and manufacturing must and can be done in such a way that manufacturing supports the environment, instead of destroying it.

“Before the Flood” is a well-done documentary on the facts and dangers of climate change, and Leonardo DiCaprio does a great job galavanting all over the world to show its effects and talk to effective speakers. I particularly liked the way he opened and closed by talking about Heironymous Bosch’s triptyque, “The Garden of Earthly Delights”.

However, I knew that it would raise my blood pressure when he started going into the solutions for climate change, because I know the conventional solutions are completely inadequate, and that my preferred solution, a Green New Deal centered on massive direct government infrastructure spending, will not even be mentioned — mainly because hardly anybody is mentioning it (except for theClimate Mobilization.org and its supporters, Goddess bless them).

Donald Trump offered a solution to the problem of not enough good jobs, and Hillary Clinton did not. That is the core of what happened. Democrats need to offer a better solution than Trump, and then they will take the Presidency and the Congress. Sure, he stirred up racism, sexism, xenophobia and other bigotry, but progressives are not going to compete to be the best bigot. They can compete to be best at creating jobs, and by creating jobs they will clear away the bigotry. I will argue that the best way to create jobs is to spend trillions on a massive green infrastructure building program, which will revive manufacturing and the Democratic working class coalition.

In all the hysteria about Brexit, there seems to be a lack of a discussion of what is probably the ultimate driver of ‘Leaving’: the leaving of good jobs for about half of British voters. While there is a certain amount of racism and cultural xenophobia that is part of anti-immigration feelings, if everybody in the UK — or the United States — knew they could always have a good job, I think it is fair to say that anti-immigration votes would dry up into an irrelevant fringe. I will argue here that the Left could revive itself if it would propose a government-led plan to build a green infrastructure, rebuild manufacturing, and thereby guarantee a good job for anyone who wanted one — and provide an attractive alternative to the Right and to neoliberal ideology.

Bernie Sanders has stirred the passion of many voters by concentrating on the problem of growing income inequality. Inequality, he points out, leads to stagnating and declining income for most people. The higher income for the top 1% completely distorts the political system. With more power for Wall Street and billionaires, politicians who depend on the rich and powerful for campaign funds pass more bad policies, leading to even worse income inequality, in a vicious cycle.

The wealth of our nation has always been based on manufacturing. A country that has no manufacturing is not post-industrial, it is pre-industrial, that is, poor. The people of the United States are perfectly capable of rebuilding the manufacturing sector by concentrating on high-skill sectors such as industrial machinery and digital technology, among others. For most of our history, these statements would have been been greeted with a shrug, as if the speaker was stating the obvious.

Recently we have been warned that the global emissions of greenhouse gases, continued unabated, will result in more extreme climate events, until finally global warming will run out of control with gruesome consequences. We can’t afford to wait. Michael Mann urges scientists to speak out. Most environmental organizations call for some kind of carbon taxes, or cap-and-trade schemes. Some even advocate the construction of nuclear power plants. We are called on to have the kind of urgency we had when we won World War II, or at least, to have the fierce urgency of now.

And yet the one thing no one seems to be calling for is the one set of policies that could actually solve the problem — a nationally, government-planned reconstruction of the energy, transportation, urban and agricultural infrastructure that would result in zero emissions.

The following was published in the Costco Connection, a magazine that, according the editor, "is mailed to over 8 million businesses and their employees and family members across the country and is read by close to 20 million people."

We use manufactured goods for almost everything we do. Factories, in turn, need the workers who use their skill to operate the machinery that creates the goods. If we want economic growth, we need more manufacturing jobs.

Both Democrats and environmentalists seem to be searching for new sources of support, according to articles from Thomas Edsall and Leslie Kaufman. For Democrats, the problem is the state of mind of the “white working class,” while for environmentalists the problem is to convince the public that something should be done about climate change.

The news from the world of global warming science is grim. We need to keep the planet from warming by more than 2 degrees centigrade or the climate could become extremely dangerous. To stay below that level would require a drastic decrease in greenhouse gas emissions in the next several years.

Occupy Wall Street has put a spotlight on the vast and growing economic inequality in the United States. It now takes its place as a top progressive priority — perhaps the highest priority it has experienced since the Great Depression.

The looming global warming catastrophe could be worse, in the long term, than any war, social collapse, or single famine in human history. We need to scale up renewable technologies as quickly as possible — by any means necessary. And that is exactly what the Chinese are doing. According to Steven Lacey at Climate Progress, while world solar cell manufacturing capacity was only 100 MW in 2000, it is now 50,000 MW –- and China by itself accounts for 57 percent.

Recently, a crop of articles has appeared that argue that “our economy will thrive only when we make what we invent,” as Susan Hockstein, President of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, recently concluded in a New York Times op-ed. Hockstein is challenging the idea that the United States can somehow be a world-class source of innovation without actually producing the new products.

Between 1962 and 2009, the cumulative trade deficit of the United States almost exactly equaled the cumulative Federal budget deficit: 7,426 billion for the budget deficit, a couple of billion less for the trade deficit. That is, when you add up all the deficit numbers for those 28 years, both the trade deficits and the budget deficits have generated the same amount of red ink. The Republican House members, in particular, use fear-mongering to convince the public that the federal budget deficit is going to destroy the economy. But what about the trade deficit?

The current conventional wisdom for many in the U.S. is that the less government is involved with the economy the better. But this is precisely the moment in history when more government is needed. Without government intervention, the recovery will continue to stagnate, the economy as a whole will remain off balance, and we won’t be able to meet the challenges facing the country.

Underlying most debates about economic policy lurks a single question: what causes economic growth? This question is key when an economy is stagnating or declining. The answer decides the fates of Presidents, political parties, and whole nations.